Rachel Trousdale

List of Possible Causes of My Death

Probably cancer. Otherwise—
prematurely—sooner than the cells
themselves would instigate—
let’s hope for death by bird:
craning my neck to catch a glimpse
of an unfamiliar chevroned breast,
maybe I will fall from the back
of a motorcycle-taxi, from the window
of a subalpine chateau. Alternately,
increasingly, could it be a bullet,
three bullets, fired by a man in woodland
camouflage on a suburban street
who correctly sees me as the enemy?
How I object to dying
that way or any way, when the amaryllis
in the kitchen is just opening, when the skates
we bought are still unused; how wasteful
to dispose of a whole mind, any mind,
with its stir of ambivalence, curiosity,
desire; how nonsensical of Rupert Brooke
to celebrate heroic death, then fall
to a mosquito, two weeks too soon
to be machine gunned at Gallipoli.
Byron sweating and freezing
at Missolonghi. They didn’t get
what they signed up for. None of us do.
You can’t choose heroism, you can only not choose
to stay home, to drive past. Profligate world,
tossing aside the meticulous irreplicable
assemblage of experience that makes
a self. How wasteful fear is. What courage
it takes, sometimes, to move, to smile, to say
pleasantly to the mask, I’m not mad at you.

Originally published in Vox Populi